Chinese leak claims Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865 SoC may launch next month

[Redaktion]

Pressured by the new Apple and Huawei flagship SoCs, Qualcomm plans to launch the Snapdragon 865 model 1 month in advance, and the first handhelds to sport the new SoC will apparently come from smaller smartphone makers like Oppo and Vivo, plus the usual Huawei competitors like Xiaomi and Samsung.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Chinese-leak-claims-Qualcomm-s-Snapdragon-865-SoC-may-launch-next-month.437967.0.html

[S.Yu]

So that's N7+, which is better than the N7P Apple's A13 is on, and purportedly also better than a yet-to-come N6 which is also without EUV, whereas N5 is the successor to the EUV N7+.

[ChrisGX]

>>Will it manage to beat the A13 Bionic from Apple...there are solid chances for this to happen, as Qualcomm has been optimizing its SoCs to compete with laptop CPUs from Intel AMD<<

Apple's A series chips are a very different beast than the other ARM based processors. They follow the same energy efficiency curve as other ARM chips but have more 'top end'. For instance, the A12 big cores had 1.7x the peak core performance of licensed ARM cores at the cost of about 1.7× the power consumption of those cores. That doesn't become a problem in practice because the A series chips throttle those performance cores using an advanced thermal management system (software and DVFS features). So, in practice, while those Apple chips will typically offer a bit more more sustained performance than chips using licensed ARM cores the advantage is small with overall chip performance being governed more by the thermal and power consumption ceilings that dominate mobile device form factors than Apple's big core peak performance advantage that benchmarks like Geekbench underscore.

So, no, the SD865 won't be wiping out that peak core performance advantage of the Apple chips. But, sustained performance should be comparable to the A13 in any case (unless Apple has been able to coax even more sustained performance out of its chips using an even more advanced chip power management strategy than it has previously had at its disposal).

It is great to see the new Snapdragon 8cx doing battle with unnecessarily power hungry Intel desktop/laptop parts but it would be wrong to suppose that the 8cx represents the right path for a dedicated ARM based PC chip. Apple, as it happens, is much closer to where it needs to be to turn out ARM based PC chips that will astound consumers. In a PC, much of the untapped peak performance potential of Apple's chips will be freed from its fetters. To achieve anything similar Qualcomm would have to draw on design advances coming from Arm's infrastructure processors and not merely do a good job in incorporating specialised accelerators into an otherwise unaltered mobile chip design.

[S.Yu]

>>Will it manage to beat the A13 Bionic from Apple...there are solid chances for this to happen, as Qualcomm has been optimizing its SoCs to compete with laptop CPUs from Intel AMD<<

Apple's A series chips are a very different beast than the other ARM based processors. They follow the same energy efficiency curve as other ARM chips but have more 'top end'. For instance, the A12 big cores had 1.7x the peak core performance of licensed ARM cores at the cost of about 1.7× the power consumption of those cores. That doesn't become a problem in practice because the A series chips throttle those performance cores using an advanced thermal management system (software and DVFS features). So, in practice, while those Apple chips will typically offer a bit more more sustained performance than chips using licensed ARM cores the advantage is small with overall chip performance being governed more by the thermal and power consumption ceilings that dominate mobile device form factors than Apple's big core peak performance advantage that benchmarks like Geekbench underscore.

So, no, the SD865 won't be wiping out that peak core performance advantage of the Apple chips. But, sustained performance should be comparable to the A13 in any case (unless Apple has been able to coax even more sustained performance out of its chips using an even more advanced chip power management strategy than it has previously had at its disposal).

It is great to see the new Snapdragon 8cx doing battle with unnecessarily power hungry Intel desktop/laptop parts but it would be wrong to suppose that the 8cx represents the right path for a dedicated ARM based PC chip. Apple, as it happens, is much closer to where it needs to be to turn out ARM based PC chips that will astound consumers. In a PC, much of the untapped peak performance potential of Apple's chips will be freed from its fetters. To achieve anything similar Qualcomm would have to draw on design advances coming from Arm's infrastructure processors and not merely do a good job in incorporating specialised accelerators into an otherwise unaltered mobile chip design.

Anandtech runs Spec, and runs loops of it, and Apple still comes up on top.

[ChrisGX]

Andrei Frumusanu has been explicit on the point. SPEC sets out a defined process for the collection of benchmark data which is rigorously adhered to by Anandtech. Indeed there are two separate procedures set out by SPEC, one for peak and one for sustained performance data. Andrei has stated in past reports that the data that he disseminates is peak performance data.

[S.Yu]

Andrei Frumusanu has been explicit on the point. SPEC sets out a defined process for the collection of benchmark data which is rigorously adhered to by Anandtech. Indeed there are two separate procedures set out by SPEC, one for peak and one for sustained performance data. Andrei has stated in past reports that the data that he disseminates is peak performance data.

I see the issue here, you said "the same curve", 1.7x performance for 1.7x power is not the same curve, it means that 1x performance will certainly use less than 1x power. If A13's frequency-voltage curve follows A12's, then at 1/1.7 top performance A13 would be at 133mV consuming around 0.6W.
The figure for A13's GPU warm also suggests double the fps of the 855's for the same wattage.